Written by Sarah Maddox – Technical Writer. http://author-it.com/i8exmd

I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Matt Armstrong from Author-it gave a good, simple demo of Author-it Assist and an introduction to Author-it Aspect. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Matt. Any mistakes are mine.

Author-it Assist sounds very interesting. It can contextually link any application to any content. It works on Windows desktop applications as well as web applications.

It is performance support software (from Sarah: similar to guided help, from my understanding). It works with all enterprise IT applications, and lets you push multiple topics to the user’s desktop.

As a the help author, you select the relevant bit of the application (such as a frame or other UI element) then drag and drop the URL onto the application, to indicate that it constitutes the help for that specific screen or UI element. Your content can be delivered from any source: HTML, Word, PDF, etc. Anything that you can display in a browser.

The user sees an “Assist me” tab. When they click it and select a topic, Assist shows a side panel displaying the relevant content. This is the content that the author has marked as relevant.

Assist hooks into the UI elements of the page. It has a fuzzy logic to protect it from UI changes as much as possible.

It’s also available as a set of SDKs. You can download a free copy of the API.

Author-it Aspect is the tool that knows who you are. Based on who you are, it will dynamically filter the information sent to you, including the search information. For example, it can choose the content in the correct language for a particular user. I didn’t get as good an idea of what this one can do, but it’s worth going to the Author-it website to read up on it.

Thank you Matt for a great insight into two tools in the Author-it suite.

Greetings,

I’ve been playing around with our new release, Author-it Assist and I’m really impressed with what it can do. Author-it Assist is designed to be used in several situations, one is to provide performance support at the time of need. However you may find value in using this in your training environment as a support mechanism or for retrofitting more generic contextual help to your application. For system implementations there’s also a great value add in being able to link organizations knowledge repository into their suite of applications so that the contextual support shows ‘how we use this’ not just ‘how this works’.

Here’s a quick screen grab of the contextual assistance I’ve added to SAP – the great thing is that this is all drag and drop, so no developers need to be involved to add contextual ID links.

I’ve also created field support for specific buttons and forms. These are similar to a delayed popup on hover and give quick tips or cautions to the user.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them here.

Posted by Richard Ashurst

Author-it Software Corporation – Business Development Manager

Greetings,

I’ve been playing around with our new release – Author-it Assist and thought I should create a quick update on what it does for organizational learning & knowledge management. This stuff is great for companies with knowledge workers focusing on a need to improve productivity but also for training (either ongoing or rolling out new systems) as it reduces down the amount of formal training required, increases time to competency and supports a new, very effective informal learning strategy. If you produce any customizations, implement any system or develop an integration, this is a value add that will pay for itself.

Here’s a brief overview I created using Microsoft Dynamics as the platform. If you’re scratching your head about Assist you might want to start here: http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=assist

Now Dynamics has user assistance but this only explains ‘how it works’ not ‘how we use it’. For example, what are our procedures for logging a critical support call for platinum level customers? Some organizations aim to implement an initiative whereby a users support query is resolved in less than three clicks. How will we support this? Enter Author-it Assist. By using Author-it Assist to retrofit support material you can add predicament based support links to your systems (basically any web or windows application) and link them directly to a single Knowledge Centre simply by dragging and dropping (ie. SharePoint, Intranet, LMS or Web Help etc).

Here’s the link in the web based version of Author-it Assist.

These are the links to your customized content. This content could be anything that you can link to via a URL – training and performance support you would probably want to link to simulations and videos whilst reference material would be text based. This could / should be published from Author-it or any other tool, ie. material that already exists but is underutilized.

Here’s my support page. It loads in our Web Help with the ToC configured to be collapsed on load.

Secondly, Assist provides ‘field support’ this is noted by a little green underline on the search icon:

When I hover over it I can trigger the field support for this:

So if you’re struggling to support a system built by someone else, trying to link relevant material into your suite of applications or developing customizations or integrations and you want to add some value with exceptional support material – check out Author-it Assist!

Questions or comments? Post them here.

Richard Ashurst

Author-it Software Corporation – Business Development Manager

By Karyn Scherer – NZ Herald

[ Extract from article ]

Paul Trotter likes to joke that he has “two lives, one wife”. He means that he spends up to a third of each year overseas, and two-thirds in Auckland, where his long-suffering family have become used to his frequent absences.

It’s a sacrifice he’s prepared to make for a bit longer yet, to allow him to focus on a crucial growth phase for the software company he founded 14 years ago in a spare room at home.

What began as a single product to make desktop publishing easier to manage has evolved into a sophisticated solution for content management which is used by some of the world’s biggest companies, such as Coca-Cola, Computer Associates, and HP.

Trotter knew right from the beginning that he would have to target overseas markets, as New Zealand was simply too small.

Read full story >>

- Customer Service Extraordinaire?
- Passionate about problem solving in technology?

We’re looking for a proactive and enthusiastic person with an enquiring mind to
join the Author-it software helpdesk team, providing first and
second level support to customers and resellers.

Full job description on our website under About Us/Careers http://author-it.com/0kb6de

SAN JOSE and NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA – USA, DUBAI – UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, SYDNEY – AUSTRALIA and AUCKLAND – NEW ZEALAND – JUNE 18, 2010

Author-it Software Corporation (ASC), a world leader in software for enterprise authoring, content management, publishing, and localization, today announces the appointment of Todd Caponi to Vice President Global Sales. Caponi joins Author-it as the company celebrated its success in securing significant new business at Microsoft, Schneider Electric and Nevada Energy in the first half of 2010.

Caponi is an award winning expert in driving the revenue capacity of high growth companies. After owning and operating a sales training and consulting company, Caponi’s most recent position was with Sequoia Capital funded, Right Hemisphere where he was the Vice President of Worldwide Sales. During the recent economic downturn, he tripled the revenue output of the Right Hemisphere sales team, winning the American Business “Stevie” Award for Vice President of Worldwide Sales of the Year in 2009, beating other finalists including the Vice President of Sales from FedEx.

Read full story

Author-it and their team of authorized resellers will be holding a number of Author-it days throughout Europe in June.

Take this opportunity to speak with Author-it experts and see the latest products from Author-it. Product demonstrations will include;

• Enterprise Authoring Platform
• Dynamic Assistance Platform (Author-it Aspect and Author-it Assist)
• Sneak preview of new products due for release later in the year

Founder and CEO, Paul Trotter and Steve Davis, President will be guest speakers at the events.

For full agenda details visit our Events page

Comet Communications Single Source Forum
June 14, 2010 | 09:00 – 18:00

Author-it Day – Munich, Germany
June 15, 2010 | 09:30-13:00
FREE Event

Author-it Day – De Bilt, Netherlands
June 18, 2010 | 09:00 – 13:30
FREE Event

Author-it Day – Paris, France
June 21, 2010 | 8:30 – 11:30
FREE Event

Author-it Day – London, United Kingdom
June 24, 2010 | 12:30 – 17:00
FREE Event

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Dallas, Texas – April 26, 2010

After winning at the New Zealand VEX Robotics competition, two New Zealand teams went on to win at the VEX Robotics Competition World Championships.

Free Range Robotics (Homeschoolers) and Kristin, along with Shangahi Luwan Activity Center from China teamed up to compete against 3 teams from the USA in a best-of-three final. The team from New Zealand and China won the first round comfortably and secured the championship with a 2-0 result.

The VEX Robotics Competition World Championship included qualifying teams from 14 countries including Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States for three days of non-stop, high-energy robotics challenges. The VEX Robotics program is the largest and fastest growing middle and high school robotics competition in the world, featuring 200 events with 2,600 teams representing 20 countries.

Free Range Robotics were also presented awards for the World Champion 1st Place in Web Design, World Champion AMAZE Award (for innovative design, engineering and programming), World Champion Energy Award (for team enthusiasm and dedication) and also World Champion 1st Place Division Tournament Champion.

Congratulations from all of us at Author-it, and we look forward to next years competition.

Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation

Author-it at VEX Robotics
(http://www.vexrobotics.com/ and http://www.vexrobotics.co.nz/)

Author-it believe that New Zealand’s future engineers should be using the best tools available to them to create professional documentation about their designs and programs, and as such we are providing the national winner of the VEX essay competition with a full free version of Author-it’s Enterprise level CMS system.
On Saturday 27th March Author-it was proud to present the award for Best VEX Essay in New Zealand to Michael Lawton of the Free Range Robotics Team (read Michael’s essay here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1570). We wish Michael and the team all the best getting to and achieving at the VEX World Championships to be held in Dallas, Texas, USA.

Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation

I had a conversation today where I was discussing strategies for content architecture with a Fortune 100 high tech company. The person I was speaking with stated that they wanted to create a strategy where the content was completely independent of the tool set used to create and process it.

I believe his premise was that by making the content tool agnostic, that it enables independence from tools, and allows different parts of the organization to choose different tool sets independently to meet their specific requirements. Provided all the tools can magically inter-operate and just load and save the content in the same model everything will be wonderful.

So my question is. Is this really feasible, or is it just a flight of fancy?

My opinion is that if you are focused on satisfying the actual business requirements of users who are authoring, managing, translating, and publishing that content you cannot practically separate the tools from the content because the requirements themselves are not satisfied by either the content model or the tools, but the combination of both.

This is why you never see this type of separation in other software categories like CRM, Financials, or ERP.

If your organization was looking for a new CRM, would they design an independent data model and strategy around managing client information, then find tools that will use the model? I doubt it.

Instead they would most likely gather their business requirements, which by definition need to be independent of implementation, then go to the market with an RFI or RFP. This enables them to consider all the possible ways and technologies available to solve their problems.

I would love to hear your opinions and feedback on this subject.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation